THE BENEFITS OF AHEALTHY LIFESTYLE are enormous. I want you to know that you can: • live longer • look and feel younger • have more energy • loseweight • lower your blood cholesterol • prevent and even reverse heart disease • loweryourriskofprostate,breastandothercancers • preserve your eyesight in your later years • prevent and treat diabetes • avoid surgery in many instances • vastly decrease the need for pharmaceutical drugs • keep your bones strong • avoid impotence • avoid stroke • prevent kidney stones • keep your baby from getting Type 1 diabetes • alleviate constipation • lower your blood pressure • avoid Alzheimer's • beat arthritis • andmore... These are only some of the benefits, and all of them can be yours. The price? Simply changing your diet. I don't know that it has ever been so easy or so relatively effortless to achieve such profound benefits. I have given you a sampling of the evidence and told you the journey that I have taken to come to my conclusions. Now I want to summarize the lessons about food, health and disease that I have learned along the way in the following eight principles. These principles should inform the way we do science, the way we treat the sick, the way we feed ourselves, the way we think about health and the way we perceive the world. PRINCIPLE # 1 Nutrition represents the combined activities of countless food substances. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To illustrate this principle I only need to take you through the biochem- ical perspective of a meal. Let's say you prepare sauteed spinach with ginger and whole grain ravioli shells stuffed with butternut squash and spices, topped with a walnut tomato sauce. The spinach alone is a cornucopia of various chemical components. Chart Il.l is only a partial list of what you might find in your mouth after a bite of spinach. As you can see, you've just introduced a bundle of nutrients into your body. In addition to this extremely complex mix, when you take a bite of that ravioli with its tomato sauce and squash filling, you get thou- sands and thousands of additional chemicals, all connected in different ways in each different food-truly a biochemical bonanza. As soon as this food hits your saliva, your body begins working its magic, and the process of digestion starts. Each of these food chemicals interacts with the other food chemicals and your body's chemicals in very specific ways. It is an infinitely complex process, and it is literally impossible to understand precisely how each chemical interacts with every other chemical. We will never discover exactly how it all fits together.
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The main message I'm trying to get across is this: the chemicals we get from the foods we eat are engaged in a series of reactions that work in concert to produce good health. These chemicals are carefully orchestrated by intricate controls within our cells and all through our bodies, and these controls decide what nutrient goes where, how much of each nutrient is needed and when each reaction takes place. Our bodies have evolved with this infinitely complex network of reactions in order to derive maximal benefit from whole foods , as they appear in nature. The misguided may trumpet the virtues of one specific nutrient or chemical, but this thinking is too simplistic. Our bodies have learned how to benefit from the chemicals in food as they are pack- aged together, discarding some and using others as they see fit. I cannot stress this enough, as it is the foundation of understanding what good nutrition means. PRINCIPLE #2 Vitamin supplements are not a panacea for good health. Because nutrition operates as an infinitely complex biochemical system involving thousands of chemicals and thousands of effects on your health, it makes little or no sense that isolated nutrients taken as sup- plements can substitute for whole foods. Supplements will not lead to long-lasting health and may cause unforeseen side effects. Furthermore, for those relying on supplements, beneficial and sustained diet change is postponed. The dangers of a Western diet cannot be overcome by consuming nutrient pills. As I have watched the interest in nutrient supplements explode over the past twenty to thirty years, it has become abundantly clear why such a huge nutrient supplement industry has emerged. Huge profits are an excellent incentive, and new government regulations have paved the way for an expanded market. Furthermore, consumers want to continue eating their customary foods , and popping a few supplements makes people feel better about the potentially adverse health effects caused by their diet. Embracing supplements means the media can tell people what they want to hear and doctors have something to offer their patients. As a result, a multibillion-dollar supplement industry is now part of our nutritional landscape, and the majority of consumers have been duped into believing that they are buying health. This was the late Dr. Atkins's formula. He advocated a high-protein, high-fat diet-sacri- ficing long-term health for short-term gain-and then advocated taking his supplements to address what he called, in his own words, the "com- mon dieters' problems" including constipation, sugar cravings, hunger, l fluid retention, fatigue, nervousness and insomnia. This strategy of gaining and maintaining health with nutrient supple- ments, however, started to unravel in 1994-1996 with the large-scale investigation of the effects of beta-carotene (a precursor to vitamin A) 2 supplements on lung cancer and other diseases. , 3 After four to eight years of supplement use, lung cancer had not decreased as expected; it had increased! No benefit was found from vitamins A and E for the prevention of heart disease either. Since then, a large number of additional trials costing hundreds of millions of dollars have been conducted to determine if vitamins A, C these trials were published. , 5 The researchers, in their words, "could not determine the balance of benefits and harms of routine use of supplements of vitamins A, C or E; multivitamins with folic acid; or antioxidant combinations for the prevention of cancer or cardiovascular disease."4Indeed, they even recommended against the use of beta-caro- tene supplements. It is not that these nutrients aren't important. They are,-but only when consumed as food, not as supplements. Isolating nutrients and trying to get benefits equal to those of whole foods reveals an ignorance of how nutrition operates in the body. A recent special article in the New York Times6 documents this failure of nutrient supplements to provide any proven health benefit. As time passes, I am confident that we will continue to "discover" that relying on the use of isolated nutrient sup- plements to maintain health, while consuming the usual Western diet, is not only a waste of money but is also potentially dangerous. PRINCIPLE #3 There are virtually no nutrients in animal-based foods that are not beHer provided by plants. Overall, it is fair to say that any plant-based food has many more simi- larities in terms of nutrient compositions to other plant-based foods than it does to animal-based foods. The same is true the other way around; all animal-based foods are more like other animal-based foods than they are to plant-based foods. For example, even though fish is significantly different from beef, fish has many more similarities to beef than it has to rice. Even the foods that are "exceptions" to these rules, such as nuts, seeds and processed low-fat animal products, remain in distinct plant and animal "nutrient" groups. Eating animals is a markedly different nutritional experience from eating plants. The amounts and kinds of nutrients in these two types of foods, shown in Chart 11.2/ ,8,9illustrate these striking nutritional differences.
